The present disclosure relates to wiki-books and, more specifically, to annotated wiki-books.
Wiki software, which can also be referred to as a wiki engine or a wiki application, is collaborative software that runs a wiki, i.e., a website that allows users to create and collaboratively edit web pages via a web browser. A wiki system is usually a web application that runs on one or more web servers. The content, including all current and previous revisions, is usually stored in either a file system or a database. Wikis can be considered a type of web content management system. There are dozens of wiki engines, in a variety of programming languages and vary widely in their platform support, their support for natural language characters and conventions, and in their assumptions about technical versus social control of editing.
There are essentially three types of usage for wiki software: public-facing wikis with a potentially large community of readers and editors, private enterprise wikis for data management by corporations and other organizations, and personal wikis, meant to be used by a single person to manage notes, and usually run on a desktop. Some wiki software is specifically geared for one of the usage types, while other software can be used for all three, but contains functionality, either in its core or through plugins, that help with one or more of the usage types.
Enterprise wiki software is software meant to be used in a corporate (or organizational) context, especially to enhance internal knowledge sharing. It tends to have a greater emphasis on features like access control, integration with other software, and document management. Some proprietary wiki applications, such as for example Confluence, are marketed as enterprise wiki software.
Within organizations, wikis may be used to either add to or replace centrally managed content management systems. Their decentralized nature allows them, in principle, to disseminate needed information across an organization more rapidly and more cheaply than a centrally controlled knowledge repository. Wikis can also be used for document management, project management, customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning, and many other kinds of data management.